The Puppet tools in After Effects let you quickly add natural motion to raster images and vector graphics. Three tools create "pins" to define the point of deformation, areas of overlap, and areas that should remain more rigid. An additional tool, Puppet Sketch, lets you record animation in real time. In this exercise, you'll use the Puppet tools to animate a character slipping on a banana peel.

Adding the Character

The last element in the scene is the character himself. You'll add him to the composition and then scale and position him appropriately.

NOTE

In the original drawing, the character had already slipped on the banana peel and was falling. To make it easier to animate, the character has been modified to be more upright. It may not always be necessary (or possible) to modify the element you want to animate, but sometimes you can make your work easier by making some adjustments before animation.

Drag the Man.psd footage item from the Project panel to the Timeline panel at the top of the layer stack.

Select the Man layer, and press S to display its Scale property.

Change the Scale to 15%.

Press P to display the Position property, and change the Position to 575, 300 (see Figure 6).